


To Each Her Own Way

by bluegeekEM



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: BAMF Women, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Recovery, Strength, The Mandalorian (peripheral character), Vague references to backstory, Written for the Awesome Ladies Podficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22423018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluegeekEM/pseuds/bluegeekEM
Summary: Excerpts from the lives of three women in the Star Wars Universe.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 23





	To Each Her Own Way

**The Armorer**

Each sizzle and pop from the forge was another small wound to the heart. Each blow from her hammer mirrored one to her soul.

It wasn’t logical to feel this latest in a long series of losses so acutely, and yet, with their numbers so few and their need so great…

She would need to rest soon. Neglecting her body’s needs might make it easier to embrace the numbness for a time, but before long her work would suffer, and that was a sin that she couldn’t indulge. None of those who remained could. Nor could she disrespect those they had lost by devaluing their sacrifice with poor craftsmanship.

Numbness shouldn’t be her goal, anyways. They taught the foundlings to face their grief and focus their fears, not deny them entirely.

And so would she. 

Their people had faced elimination before and they had endured. 

There were foundlings yet to care for and train, and a new covert to establish. And for all the losses they had suffered, their resilience would serve, once again, to remind the galaxy of the Mandalorian creed.

This is the way.

~*~*~*~*~

**The Krill Farmer**

“Who knows how to shoot?”

The only response the Mandalorian received was shuffling and sidelong glances among the villagers.

Despite the helmet that masked his every expression, Omera still supposed that she could read the Mandalorian’s dismay in his long moment of stillness followed by the minute slump of his shoulders. 

She pressed her lips together for a long moment, considering, but then, what else could she do, really? They’d asked for this: for help from this soldier. Revealing what meager tools he had available to him was all reeds and weaving to their request for aid.

Omera raised her hand and ignored the curious stares from those around her. These friends and neighbors, some who’d accepted her upon her return without question or hesitancy, and some who’d…

Well. Theirs was a very small village on a very insignificant planet. It’s not every day that one of their number left the region, never mind the star system. It’s even less common for one to leave this backwater a dewy-eyed young newlywed and return a widow with a tiny child in tow, matured far beyond the years she’d been away and disinclined to share the story of why.

She was likely about to fuel a few theories about her time away, perhaps confirm a rumor or two. If she remembered enough to back-up her claim, that is.

***

She did. And it took less time to scrub the algae from her trigger arm than she’d expected, given the years that had passed in relative quiet. 

She would think on that later, when this crisis had passed.

~*~*~*~*~

**The Soldier**

When you sign on as a soldier to fight in a war against overwhelming odds, there isn’t a lot of focus on what happens after you’ve won.

Oh, Cara had heard plenty of talk about _motivation_ and _not giving up hope_ and the peace they were trying to restore to the galaxy. But the actual gritty details of what she’d be left with when their ragtag band of rebels won against the odds?

Well, the bureaucrats had grand plans and transition teams and plenty of strategists moving holographic representations of units just like hers across the galactic map. Meanwhile, she still didn’t have a planet to rebuild or a home to fight for.

Missions that had once been urgent stealth operations to clean up Imperial remnants gradually turned into political deployments and peacekeeping missions. The only action to be had was that of a now-formalized military lackey.

Hell, she might have been a lackey before, too, but at least she’d had clear objectives and an urgent purpose fueled by loss and rage. She’d done what she had to do.

Babysitting dignitaries and quelling riots among the people they were purported to have been saving?

Not what she signed up for.

So she’d left. That, in itself, had been easy. A defined objective, a concrete action.

Once again, however, it was the ‘what comes next’ part that had proven to be… murkier.

Cutting herself off from that old life had been a necessity, eventually. Not only due to the circumstances following her ‘retirement’ but also because you can’t just put the soldier away and pull her out when you decided it was convenient. 

She’d roamed the galaxy, taking on any job that piqued her interest and promised to fill her pockets with enough to live on, so long as it satisfied the burn in her gut that drove her to take back what she could from what was left of the Empire. All the things that the Galactic Concordance said they could no longer do, she was game for.

It had grown more and more difficult to gain access to the systems where the Imperial remnants had retreated, pretending to abide by the dictates of their treaties. As the New Republic slowly stabilized, they too began to take more notice of such aggressions and began to act in defense of the Concordance, if not the vestiges of the Empire. Fewer and fewer jobs came along that allowed Cara to fulfill that part of her that still yearned for the battle, until those opportunities dried up altogether.

And where had that left her?

A few years older, no less angry, and constantly on the alert for the day when someone finally put a bounty on her head, hoping to drag her forward to answer for her choices.

The only chance of fading into obscurity was to pack away the resentment that fueled that part of herself and lie low. 

After all, nothing else had managed to quiet her vengeful instincts, why not try this?

***

Being pulled into a defense job for a handful of coins on a Sorgan backwater? Well, it was still babysitting, but at least it felt like a different kind. 

Discovering the AT-ST was enough to give her pause, but still… Taking a group of raw, untrained fisherfolk and teaching them how to fight back against a larger and better-armed foe? Well, at least that felt true to her Rebel roots, far more than acting as the New Republic’s police force ever had. 

***

And then the Mandalorian returned and tried to lure her back into the fray with promises of mercenary work and a happy retirement. As if beating up the occasional overconfident local in a friendly brawl for bar entertainment wasn’t the very definition of living the dream.

With a pouch full of freshly won credits at her side, he was easy to decline. “I’m already free of worry.” At least the kind of worry that credits can solve. “And I’m not in the mood to play soldier anymore. Especially fighting some local warlord.”

“He’s not a local warlord.”

Cara had a difficult relationship with her gut instinct. She resented the hell out of it, but she trusted it all the same, and right now? Right now it was telling her to close her ears and not listen to a word the Mandalorian spoke, because she absolutely would not like what he was about to tell her. 

Or what she would have to do in response. 

“He’s Imperial.”

Yup. There it was. The one flickering ember of her old life that she’d yet to extinguish, fueled as it was by the grief that had yet to fade and the guilt that tugged at her each day she lived while so many others were gone. 

Well, her answer was still an easy one. 

“I’m in.”

~*~*~*~*~

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology in collaboration with tipsy_kitty.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] To Each Her Own Way | written by bluegeekEM](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23007520) by [Tipsy_Kitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tipsy_Kitty/pseuds/Tipsy_Kitty)




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